Today's Features

CPA PE Deal Tracker™: The Next Deal Cycle Comes into View

By CPA Trendlines Research

Going into the fourth quarter of 2026, Wall Street’s buying spree for accounting firms is cooling as platform firms digest a two-year surge of acquisitions and the earliest investors, from three to five years ago, begin to cash out, according to the CPA Trendlines CPA PE Deal Tracker™.

MORE Private Equity: Michael Hoover: Growth Without Discipline Comes at a Cost | Big 4 Transparency | CBIZ Told Grant Thornton No, No, No, Before Saying Yes | PE Already Knows Your Price. Do You? | How Private Equity Turns CPA Loyalty into Legal Risk | Ira Rosenbloom: PE Forces Firms to Pick a Future | The Disruptors | Allan Koltin: What Elite CPA Firms Do Differently | Gear Up for Growth

The October 2026 edition of the CPA PE Deal Tracker™ shows accounting’s private-equity deal flow easing in the third quarter, with 37 acquisitions in the U.S. and Canada, down from 42 a year earlier and a far cry from this year’s first-quarter surge of 58. The Tracker now counts 400 such deals in the U.S. and Canada since its records began in December 2016, plus 87 it has found elsewhere, for 487 worldwide, although its coverage outside North America is not systematic.

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How to Assess Your Firm’s Performance

Seven key filters to use.

By Anthony Zecca
Leading from the Edge

Now that we have completed an assessment of your leadership team and your leadership, the third leg is assessing the overall performance of the firm. This assessment, coupled with the assessment of the leadership team and your leadership, provides a strong foundation upon which to build the roadmap (strategies) for moving the firm from where it is today to a standout, high-performing firm. The underlying objective for this assessment of the firm is to have a factual basis for establishing a myth-free and accurate baseline of the firm by analyzing a number of key characteristics.

MORE by Anthony Zecca
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What are the major areas of focus for the firm assessment? In center-led firms, the assessment of how well the firm is doing is generally focused around financial metrics. How much profit did we make? What was our growth? What was the change in average partner compensation? What profit percentage to revenue did we achieve?
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The AI Demo Is Easy. The Rollout Gets Complicated. | Innovation Insights

Building an accounting tool with AI is only the beginning of making it useful, secure, and sustainable.

Sponsored by Radical Pricing by the Radical CPA, Jody Padar | See Today’s Special Offer
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Optimize Profits, Delight Clients, & Build a Top-Value Firm!

Innovation Insights
With Donny Shimamoto and Byron Patrick
Center for Accounting Transformation

An accountant builds a dashboard that pulls information from several systems. A proposal generator turns service selections into a polished PDF. A homemade utility eliminates a tedious step in the monthly close.

Then comes the question that changes everything: How do I let my team use it?

In this episode of Innovation Insights, Donny Shimamoto and Byron Patrick explore the distance between a promising personal tool and software an accounting team can depend on.

More Donny Shimamoto

AI makes building easier, they say, but sharing, securing, supporting, and maintaining what you build requires a different level of preparation.

For accountants eager to experiment with AI agents and “vibe coding” — using natural-language instructions to have AI generate code — the conversation offers both encouragement and a reality check.

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If AI Is Saving Time, Why Are You Still Working Late?

How fast (or slow) are accountants adopting AI? Depends on whom you ask.

Six Surveys. Eleven Answers.

By CPA Trendlines Research

Hourly billing is fading. Advisory is spreading. Artificial intelligence is freeing accountants to do more valuable work.

But agreement may end there.

The meanings of adoption, advisory and the AI dividend are leaving firm leaders with sometimes clashing pictures of how far the change is going.

MORE AI: Gen AI in Accounting: Epic Transformation, or Overheated Hype? | Intuit, Thomson, Wolters Kluwer: Accountants Question AI Promises | Caseware’s David Marquis: AI Can Do More Work but Auditors Must Make the Call | AI Accountants Cut Costs per Task to 21 cents from $10.35 | Your Next Hire Might Not Be an Accountant | It’s Not Just the Numbers

The problem surfaces again in a fresh series of surveys that tell different, even confusing, versions of the same story. One study finds advisory in 57 percent of surveyed U.S. practices. Another puts advisory or consulting at 94 percent in its U.S. sample. A pricing-platform survey finds little hourly billing for particular services. A broader practice-management benchmark finds most responding firms still use hourly billing.

Firm leaders are being shown evidence of progress, but the evidence does not consistently measure the same progress. READ MORE →

Intuit, Thomson, Wolters Kluwer: Accountants Question AI Promises

At the big three user conferences, AI is changing the rules… again.

Vendors take center stage at user conferences. Logos: Thomson Reuters, QuickBooks, Wolters Kluwer

By CPA Trendlines Research

Over the next few weeks, Intuit, Wolters Kluwer and Thomson Reuters will be gathering their users in Las Vegas and Orlando, each bringing software and strategies that accountants fear could encroach on a firm’s client relationships.

Intuit Connect – Oct. 26-28, Aria, Las Vegas. Client books, monthly close, advisory, agents and the accountant relationship. More than 100 breakouts. Up to 12 CPE credits. Learn more
CCH Connections (Wolters Kluwer) – Oct. 25-28, Grande Lakes, Orlando. Tax and audit production, review, migrations and quality management. More than 90 sessions. Up to 19 CPE. Learn more
Thomson Reuters Synergy – Nov. 16-19, Fontainebleau, Las Vegas. Research, preparation, document workflows and engagement evidence. Combined professional audiences; separate general sessions. Learn more

The gap between firms and vendors provides a lens into the season. Intuit Connect, Wolters Kluwer’s CCH Connections and Thomson Reuters Synergy are pairing agentic AI demos with sessions on pricing, review, staffing and leadership. READ MORE →

Managing Walkthroughs Like a Process (Not a Meeting)

How high-performing teams turn a recurring pain point into a source of control and insight

By William Englehaupt

If walkthroughs consistently generate delay and rework, the solution is not incremental improvement in meeting execution. It requires a different approach to how the work itself is structured and managed.

Effective teams begin with a simple but consequential reframing. Walkthroughs are not events; they are a process with a defined start and end point, a sequence of standard activities, and clear ownership for each step. That process typically includes preparation, coordination of PBC requests, structured meeting execution, post-meeting follow-up, and timely completion of documentation and review. When these elements are not explicitly defined, they occur inconsistently, and the gaps between them become the source of delay.

MORE Productivity | MORE Audit and Assurance

One of the most effective ways to stabilize this process is to make the work visible. High-performing teams rely on structured walkthrough trackers that map each step in the process, assign responsibility, and establish expected timing. These are not static checklists but dynamic tools that reflect the flow of work before, during, and after the walkthrough meeting. By making dependencies explicit, they allow both the audit team and the client to understand how delays in one area affect the broader timeline.

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